Setup

On this page we describe the pre-requisites for working with ink!.

Rust & Cargo

A pre-requisite for compiling smart contracts is to install a stable Rust version (>= 1.85) and cargo. Please see the official Rust installation guide.

ink! CLI

The first tool we will be installing is cargo-contract, our CLI tool for help with setting up and managing smart contracts written with ink!.

The tool has a number of handy capabilities:

$ cargo contract --help
Utilities to develop ink! smart contracts

Usage: cargo contract <COMMAND>

Commands:
  new              Setup and create a new smart contract project
  build            Compiles the contract, generates metadata, bundles both together in a `<name>.contract` file
  check            Check that the code builds for PolkaVM; does not output any `<name>.contract` artifact to the `target/` directory
  upload           Upload contract code
  instantiate      Instantiate a contract
  call             Call a contract
  account          Account handling and information
  encode           Encodes a contracts input calls and their arguments
  decode           Decodes a contracts input or output data (supplied in hex-encoding)
  remove           Remove contract code
  info             Display information about a contract
  storage          Inspect the on-chain storage of a contract
  verify           Verifies that a given contract binary matches the build result of the specified workspace
  generate-schema  Generates schema from the current metadata specification
  verify-schema    Verify schema from the current metadata specification
  rpc              Make a raw RPC call
  help             Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

Installation

Please see the installation instructions in the cargo-contract repository here.

If everything worked, cargo contract --help should show you the above list of available commands.

Installing ink-node

The ink-node is a simple Polkadot SDK blockchain which is configured to include the Polkadot SDK module for smart contract functionality – the pallet-revive (see Polkadot SDK for more). It's a comfortable option for local development and testing.

There are two ways of installing the node:

(1) Download the Binary

This is the recommended method, you can download a binary from our releases page (Linux and Mac).

(2) Build it yourself

Alternatively, you can build the node by yourself. This can take a while though!

The build instructions and pre-requisites can be found here.